I had an immaculately clean kitchen floor for a minute yesterday. But like everything in life, clean is impermanent. As soon as I let the dogs in from the back yard, my sparkly clean floor was gone.
As many of you know from my Lynn’s Weigh blog, I’ve been studying Buddhist teachings and practicing vipassana meditation for a few years. One of the most difficult concepts I am working to accept and not fear is impermanence, particularly as it relates to my body, and specifically as it relates to weight and physical ability.
(I’ll be using quotes throughout this blog entry from a talk on impermanence given by Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal of the Insight Meditation Center.)
“Buddhist practice points us toward becoming equanimous in the midst of change and wiser in how we respond to what comes and goes.”
Last week, I went to see my knee doctor to see if there was anything more I could do to improve the health of my knees and continue to stave off knee replacement surgery. I’ve been having significant issues with my sciatic nerve in both glutes and I suspected the problem stemmed from the physiology of my knees. He said yes, my gait has changed and will continue to change. Arthritic deterioration is a process, and while my knees don’t hurt much, their changes influence the changes in other parts of my body. Nothing’s permanent.
He said I should adjust my cardio routine(s) to less resistance and longer sets, and to lay off power walking. Hearing this, I immediately thought, “But I’ll gain weight!”
“We may not resist aging as much as we resist letting go of cherished concepts of ourselves and our bodies. One of our most ingrained attachments is to self, self-image, and self-identity.”
The street I live on has on a barely noticeable incline (or decline, depending on which direction you’re looking). When I weighed 300 pounds, I could barely walk a block and I had to take several breaks if I walked the entire length – two blocks.
I didn’t begin a formal exercise regimen until I lost more than 100 pounds, and when I did, I chose to walk. I wanted to walk because I wanted to slay that dragon, to prove I could do it and not have to stop every 500 feet to stretch out the pain in my back. I attacked walking voraciously, walking every time like it was the last time. I got really good at it, and fast. I can (well, could) do a 5K in 38 minutes. Not bad for a woman who was told when she developed osteoarthritis at 18 that she’d be in a wheelchair by the time she was 40.
So for the last three years I’ve identified myself as someone who exercises fast and hard. After learning to walk fast and hard, I went on to bike fast and hard, and work out on the elliptical and arc trainer fast and hard. I convinced myself that in order to maintain my weight loss, I must cling to this identity. But my body is asking (actually, it’s begging) me to soften a bit, think it all through, and to change and work with what it can still give me.
To resist the impermanence of a fully functioning knee (or any other body part) is to risk further pain (or, in Buddhist terms, suffering). The question is: How do I contribute to my own suffering? Answer: By clinging to a self-identity that depends on what her body used to be able to do and not what it can do now.
“We also realize that our clinging and resistance have very little to do with the experience itself. We mostly cling to ideas and concepts, not things or experiences in and of themselves.”
It’s the idea of walking 5-miles-per-hour or cranking the resistance up to 75 percent that I’m clinging to more than the actual experience. The idea says, “If you do this, you will not gain weight.” The actual experience says, “Umm….this kind of hurts, Lynn. Let’s talk about this.”
“As we see impermanence clearly, we see that there is nothing real that we can actually cling to. Our deep-seated tendency to grasp is challenged, and so may begin to relax. We see that our experiences don't correspond to our fixed categories, ideas, or images. We realize that reality is more fluid than any of our ideas about it.”
How will this new workout reality play out? Will I gain weight? How will my body respond? I don’t know. I need to give this new experience of less resistance and more time a chance. Who knows? I might not gain weight and I might not have any more extreme pain from my sciatic nerve. By not clinging to the body that could do it all a few years ago and accepting its impermanence just might promote better health (or in Buddhist terms, happiness).
“The final, liberative level of impermanence is the movement towards letting go at the deepest level of our psyche. Ajahn Chah once said, ‘If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace. If you let go a lot you’ll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace.’”
I want that peace. I want to let go. I want to become equanimous and wiser. It’s certainly better than sore glute muscles. But wanting isn’t doing. It takes a lot of work to do the things we want.
And so I will work to accept the impermanent nature of my body and find a way to work within its current parameters in order to maintain my weight. What I did two years ago I can’t do so well now. What I do now I’ll probably not be able to do so well two years from now. But it doesn’t mean I have to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a path to accepting this bodily impermanence, and if I can lose 170 pounds and walk a 5K in 38 minutes, I can find that path, too.
